Using SEO (search engine optimization) to justify accessibility was only ever a technique for bosses or clients or stakeholders who see accessibility as a cost center and are typically driven more by dashboards or money. Ideally, you want to get past that ASAP to drive better outcomes for humans, not SERPs (search engine results pages). I get it as a foot-in-the-door tactic — hopefully it goes no further.

But SEO also drove bad accessibility practices, such as alt text keyword stuffing, low-contrast text, verbose headings, link text built around keywords, gratuitous landing pages, and more. Karl does a good job of demonstrating how little SEO and accessibility are connected. As such, I’ve always been wary of companies pitching accessibility and SEO in their marketing.

Now I see companies pitching accessible & “AI-ready” or “agent friendly” work, often still including SEO. I’m calling foul.

We’ve already seen anti-user guidance from LLM companies asking for their notion of accessible sites. Never mind that these PhD-level genius LLM tools can’t handle a general site most kids navigate with ease. Let’s ignore the failure of that technology and instead start slapping misunderstood ARIA attributes on all our pages instead.

Sure, there’s overlap between SEO and LLM-thieving. SEO and accessibility even have slight overlap. But accessibility is about people. Twisting a human affordance to feed these corporate efforts to make humans redundant (among all the other harms) is a signal. Different people will read that signal in different ways. If it sells work and you still focus on humans first, cool.

But to me that signal says you aren’t serious about the work. That your TESCREAL patch is just waiting to get sewn on. I’m trying to be less absolutist, less black-and-white. But boy is it hard given what I see every time I peel back the veneer.

I made a thing (based on an old experiment) to better illustrate where I see the overlaps.

See the Pen Accessibility + SEO + AEO by Adrian Roselli (@aardrian) on CodePen.